


Parallax

by bloodbright



Series: Mass Effect works [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Colonist (Mass Effect), Gen, Historians, POV Outsider, Pseudo-History, Renegade Commander Shepard, Ruthless (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-23 22:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2557460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard can hardly be blamed for harboring a deep hatred of the batarians. The attack on Mindoir when she was sixteen, in which her family was killed and the colony devastated by slavers, was undoubtedly the defining moment of her life up to that point; her eventual rescue by an Alliance patrol no doubt cemented her decision to enlist.</p><p>     - Alan Simonis, <em>Beyond First Contact: Humanity’s Struggle in a Hostile Galaxy</em>, p. 94</p><p>The temptation for the lazy historian is to draw a straight line from the attack on Mindoir to Shepard’s actions at Torfan, but the fact is that by 2178 Shepard had engaged the batarians on multiple occasions—and always disengaged promptly when ordered to do so. Torfan represented not a loss of control but a calculated statement.</p><p>     - Sara Janowski, <em>Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance</em>, p. 90</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parallax

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes a tremendous debt in spirit to Speranza’s [Written by the Victors](http://archiveofourown.org/works/15), which is well worth reading even if you’re not familiar with Stargate: Atlantis. Many thanks to thievinghippo for running the challenge during which I wrote the bulk of this story, and to tarysande and Fistful of Gamma Rays for betaing. All remaining errors are mine alone.

Shepard received the coveted N7 designation and a promotion to staff lieutenant in March 2178, just a month short of her 24th birthday. Her reward for completing the toughest training the Alliance had to offer: a mission on an obscure moon in the Skyllian Verge called Torfan.

     - Charlotte Winters, _Commander Shepard: The Definitive Biography_ , p. 67

—

Shepard can hardly be blamed for harboring a deep hatred of the batarians. The attack on Mindoir when she was sixteen, in which her family was killed and the colony devastated by slavers, was undoubtedly the defining moment of her life up to that point; her eventual rescue by an Alliance patrol no doubt cemented her decision to enlist.

     - Alan Simonis, _Beyond First Contact: Humanity's Struggle in a Hostile Galaxy_ , p. 94

The temptation for the lazy historian is to draw a straight line from the attack on Mindoir to Shepard's actions at Torfan, but the fact is that by 2178 Shepard had engaged the batarians on multiple occasions—and always disengaged promptly when ordered to do so. Torfan represented not a loss of control but a calculated statement. If Shepard took particular pleasure in making that statement, she showed no sign of it.

From the beginning, the assault on Torfan was intended as a show of power in response to the Skyllian Blitz, and Admiral Hackett's speech to the assembled marines before the attack emphasized the necessity of asserting human strength. Shepard had herself been present at the Skyllian Blitz as a member of one of the ground teams fortuitously on leave on Elysium; she would have keenly understood the importance of the mission.

     - Sara Janowski, _Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance_ , p. 90

Shepard's actions at Torfan were not uncontrolled, but to call them calculated is an overstatement. The commander possessed a remarkable ability to operate on instinct; she had a record of making decisions on the fly under pressure, often on rationales that were unclear at the time but turned out to be near-prescient in hindsight. It helped that she generally brought the firepower to back them up.

     - Emerson Blake, _Ad Astra: A Life of Commander Shepard_ , p. 97

—

The final count at Torfan: 2,893 Alliance marines died in the ground assault and a further 553 were injured for a total of 3,446 human casualties, accounting for approximately three-quarters of the 4,000 Alliance marines in the landing party. It is estimated that 2,000 batarians were killed in the bombardment from the air and 4,000 batarians in the initial ground assault, with an additional 2,500 executed after surrendering, wiping out eight-five percent of a conjectured population of ten thousand. There were no prisoners.

     - Theodora Rinaldi, "Paying the Butcher: Torfan Revisited"

Though the occupants of Torfan have generally described been as pirates, they are more accurately characterized as privateers. They operated with funding from the batarian government and in concert with the official military, sometimes actually inside the chain of command. In short, they were exactly the sort of state-sponsored terrorists and slavers that had attacked Mindoir.

Mindoir wasn't the first human colony the batarians hit, nor would it be the last; but it was the beginning of the end. They had sown the seeds of their own destruction. It was at Torfan that those seeds finally bore fruit.

     - Adina T'Min _, Sunset on Khar'shan: The Last Days of the Batarian Hegemony_ , p. 214

Rear Admiral Steven Hackett commanded the expeditionary force, a detachment from the Fifth Fleet that comprised eight cruisers and forty-three frigates, all of them crammed to the gills with marines. Major Davis Kyle commanded the ground forces.

The attack on Torfan began with an aerial engagement that lasted for six hours. Despite outnumbering the Alliance vessels three to one, the motley collection of pirate ships was no match for the coordination and discipline of Alliance forces. Once they had been driven off, heavy bombardment of the moon's surface commenced, intended to drive the remaining batarians deep underground and make room for troops in shuttles to land safely. Up to this point, everything went according to plan.

Torfan was a bloodbath even before Shepard took command. Alliance engineers had made the usual calculations regarding the expected impact of the bombardment, estimating that the batarians would be forced to retreat to a depth of half a mile; but Torfan's unusually dense rock meant that the engineers severely overestimated penetration depth and thus how much time Alliance forces would have to land. By the time Alliance shuttles began to land, batarian forces were lurking just out of sight in the mouths of the tunnels. They waited until the sky was swarming with too many shuttles for those on the ground to take off again. Then they opened fire.

A remarkable string of bad luck for the Alliance command followed. Major Kyle's shuttle was disabled by a stray shot, left adrift without propulsion or communication for the majority of the battle; by the time he made it to the ground in a replacement shuttle, the marines he should have commanded were deep underground beyond the reach of his communicator. His second-in-command, Staff Commander Pratik Chaudhri, was killed within minutes of landing, as was Lieutenant Commander Brigitte Fontaine, while Staff Commander Phyllis Mendoza was seriously injured and evacuated at the first opportunity. Lieutenant Commanders Haneul Kim, Adisa Afolayan, Saburo Takenaka, and Adrienne Dressler were all variously killed or incapacitated. When the smoke cleared, Shepard was in command.

     - Charlotte Winters _, Commander Shepard: The Definitive Biography_ , p. 70

—

Torfan was the beginning of the long association between Shepard and the commanding officer who would later send her on the mission that ended with the destruction of a mass relay and the death of three hundred thousand batarians, and then ultimately to the Citadel to activate the Crucible. Admiral Steven Hackett had an keen eye for competence regardless of rank, forming close, long-lasting associations with trusted individuals who as a result often rose rapidly through the ranks—a group that included both Shepard and her mentor, Councilor David Anderson, as well as Captain Agnes Harta of the SSV _Hong Kong_ , Captain Matthew Brown, and Staff Commander Harun Demirci. He also had a particularly rare and valuable gift for those in positions of power: the ability to see when his subordinates knew what they were doing paired with enough humility to get out of the way. Even so, he couldn't have known how thoroughly his faith in Shepard would ultimately be justified.

     - Sara Janowski, _Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance_ , p. 98

"Shepard came highly recommended. Top of her class at N-school, and at least two of her instructors contacted me personally to tell me that when they heard she'd been assigned to my command. I had my eye on her from the beginning.

"And then Torfan, well—by the time she was on the comm, the casualty rate was up to maybe ten percent—which doesn't sound like much compared to what it turned into later, but was already higher than we saw in most operations—and she still sounded cool as a cucumber. No fear in her at all.

"I said it was her call. She said the situation was under control and she was going in. That was the last we heard from her for the next two days."

     - Admiral Steven Hackett, 14 June 2190

Hackett's remarkably unenlightening interview raises more questions than it answers. He seems stunningly nonchalant about an inexperienced junior officer commanding a major operation deep inside enemy territory with zero guidance from above.

However reprehensible her decisions may have been, it is unsurprising that they would have been made by a young officer alone and in over her head. Culpability falls not on her but on the commanding officer and his inexplicable abdication of responsibility. The call to go in should never have been made by a newly minted staff lieutenant under any circumstances, no matter how highly recommended. In this moment we see the Battle of the Citadel foreshadowed, when Hackett again left the fateful decision to engage—this time, with the entirety of three fleets and an unknown enemy—to Shepard, resulting once again in a bloodbath that left the Alliance military ill-prepared for the Reaper attack.

     - Alan Simonis, _Beyond First Contact: Humanity's Struggle in a Hostile Galaxy_ , p. 108

—

Torfan was hardly the anomaly it is often described as; rather, it was the logical culmination of the Alliance's aggressively expansionist policy. With the Council unwilling and the batarians unable to check human encroachment, it also marked the end of any real resistance to rapid human settlement of habitable planets in the Skyllian Verge. Skirmishes would continue for a decade, but for the batarians, the war was lost at Torfan.

     - Adina T'Min _, Sunset on Khar'shan: The Last Days of the Batarian Hegemony_ , p. 345

The easy explanation is that Shepard was motivated by the memory of the attack on Mindoir, but the truth is that she would almost certainly have harbored a deep xenophobia even had that attack never occurred. Early human colonies, established with the First Contact War still fresh in the collective consciousness, were bastions of narrow-minded suspicion, exacerbated by the general human tendency toward insularity in small, closed communities. The ongoing batarian threat didn't help matters.

     - Horace Gentille, "The Colonial Issue"

Gentille falls prey to the worst stereotypes regarding colonists. First, recovered colony records indicate that Mindoir was home to a small but significant minority of aliens, mostly asari and turians, making up approximately three percent of the semi-permanent population. But more importantly, Gentille has somehow managed to forget Shepard's unlikely and diverse crew, which included representatives from nearly every major race (with the notable but unsurprising exception of the batarians), as well as the fact that under Shepard's command, the _Normandy_ was repeatedly chosen as a neutral site for meetings between the leaders of multiple races during the Reaper War.

Even before the arrival of humans on the scene, batarians had always coexisted uneasily with the remainder of the Council races. The arrival of humanity on the Citadel only accelerated, not created, a conflict that had been brewing for centuries over the question of slavery. The batarian defeat at Torfan was just one more instance of human sweat, blood, and tears accomplishing what the Council had been unable or unwilling to do, and it eliminated a threat to the peaceful coexistence of all the Council races. The batarian retreat from Council space was a relief for everyone.

     - Alan Simonis, _Beyond First Contact: Humanity's Struggle in a Hostile Galaxy_ , p. 128

—

Torfan lies on the far edge of the Skyllian Verge, a moon orbiting a gas giant that itself orbits a binary star. It has one unique trait: its dense rock, impregnated with a heavy dose of lead, makes communications outside line-of-sight virtually impossible. As soon as Alliance marines entered the tunnels, they would be cut off from all outside contact.

The tunnels of Torfan run three miles deep. It had not been the batarians who carved them out of the rocky moon; when they first arrived in 276 CE, they found an empty warren ready and waiting to be occupied, bare of any sign of its former inhabitants. It became a den of lawlessness in short order, with individual slavers carving out small territories in a constantly shifting web of alliances and betrayals. That confounding warren had been thrown into further chaos by the bombardment, which had turned the moon's surface into a treacherous landscape of jutting boulders and broken stone and destabilized the tunnels lying underneath.

It was into this labyrinth that Shepard sent her unit.

     - Charlotte Winters _, Commander Shepard: The Definitive Biography_ , p. 73

``

Interrogator: Tell us what you saw, Major Kyle.  
Kyle: Bodies. Oh God, the bodies—floor to ceiling, nothing but bodies—  
Interrogator: Calm down.  
Kyle: You don't understand. She killed them. She killed all of them. There's no one left.

     - Transcript from Major Davis Kyle's post-battle debriefing, 23 Nov 2178

"We fought our way in. It was bloody, but we knew what we were getting into. Guys were climbing over each other to volunteer anyway for this mission. Everyone wanted to give those bastards what they were asking for. One of the NCOs in my unit had served at Mindoir with a cybernetic leg to show for it, and he made sure we knew exactly who it was we were fighting and why. It was time to take the fight to them.

"Anyway, the thing about batarians is most of them'll just give up if whoever's in charge dies. We'd gone in maybe two hundred yards the first time we hit real resistance. There was a firefight and about half of them fled deeper in, but we pinned down the other half in a little dead end off to the side. When Janowski sniped their commanding officer, that was it for them.

"That was the first batch that tried to surrender. Shepard told them to get down on their knees, hands on their heads, facing the wall. They did. Then she stepped up behind the first one and just shot him in the head. When one of them started to protest, she shot him too. Then she told us to finish the job.

"We did it. You know, at the time, I thought—we're not fucking krogan, you know? We've got some standards. But I'm a soldier and I obey orders, and anyway the murdering bastards had it coming. I'm not losing any sleep over it. And I'll tell you why in a moment. Because we kept going, kept pushing deeper into that shithole, fighting batarians all the way, until finally we found where they were keeping all their slaves.

"It wasn't just humans down there. There were a bunch of turians too, a couple of asari, one lonely quarian. Three vorcha by themselves in a little cage in the corner, not even big enough to stand up in. There's a reason no one likes batarians. But most of them were human. You can't begin to imagine what it was like, the stink of it, all of them there standing in their own filth, packed in so tight they could barely move.

"They had the slaves separated by age. The first pen was the adults, the older ones—the humans over twenty-five. No old people, though. The people we rescued told us later that the slavers just shot everyone over fifty. Then the teenagers and young adults. And the kids by themselves—there was a little girl, couldn't've been older than ten, still holding on to the body of her dead baby sister. I'll never forget that. Half of them had those fucking horrifying cranial implants. They didn't even move when we showed up, didn't look at us, nothing. They would've just stood there while somebody sawed their arm off, they'd been conditioned that hard to not escape.

"Nobody was going to turn back after seeing that. Shepard ordered us to kill every batarian we saw. No prisoners. After what we saw down there, nobody disagreed."

     - Corporal Sofia Bergstrom, 21 Nov 2178

"You humans take things so personally, like we're just out to make your lives miserable. It's not like that. It's just business.

"Listen, I've got a wife back home, I've got two kids. Guess I'll never see them again. I only had four months left to go on my contract, and then I was out. Three years out there and you can save enough to buy a house, come home with a slave or two to keep it tidy.

"I was in one of the last groups that surrendered before everyone else got the message that there was no point. I don't know, he was in a hurry, or—the shot just grazed the side of my head and I fell down. He didn't even check, just kept on going down the line.

"I just lay there and didn't move. I waited until they were all gone, and then I ran."

     - Gorik Har'ran, 09 Jan 2181

"They begged, all right? They begged on their knees. I'm no alien-lover, but seeing that—you never forget seeing someone cry from four eyes, I guess.

"And it wasn't fucking worth it. What was the point—kill all of them just so their buddies up ahead know there's no reason to surrender? Maybe we'd have lost fewer guys if the batarians weren't fighting to the last man because they knew they were going to die anyway. I mean, we'd beaten them. They weren't going to be hurting anyone else. They were going to be rotting in jail for the rest of their miserable lives.

"But that's nothing compared to what happened later. When we got to the holding pens, we thought we'd found all the slaves. We were wrong."

     - Private Evgeni Sokolov, 22 Nov 2178

—

What happened at Torfan was inevitable from the moment Alliance command made the decision to send a force of inadequate size on a mission intended to make a statement. The mission was dogged by politics from beginning to end, from the decision to launch the mission to the logistics of the attack itself. The Alliance brass, already stretched thin attempting to protect the rapid expanding swathe of human colonies, were reluctant to commit resources to a major offensive deep in the Terminus systems, while Parliament insisted that something be done to show that they were taking action against the batarian threat.

As a junior officer thrust into an unenviable situation, Shepard merely made a convenient scapegoat. In fact, slaughter or ignominious retreat was nearly inevitable. That the assault succeeded at all in spite of a substantial numerical disadvantage is a credit to Alliance troops; it is absolutely certain that they lacked the manpower to both guard prisoners and continue to push forward. The decision to execute batarian prisoners was a practical one, forced by the exigencies of war and circumstances far beyond Shepard's control.

Furthermore, though the Alliance brass has always been reluctant to admit it, the mandate to kill came from the very top. Torfan had little value as a purely military objective; the intent from the beginning was to make a statement in response to the Skyllian Blitz.

Call it political acumen, force of personality, or a particular facility with a verbal bludgeon; it remains an incontrovertible fact that Shepard had an underrated flair for politics. Her choice to save a Council that had repeatedly dismissed her warnings and shown itself to be an ineffective and obstructionist force later proved instrumental in persuading other races of humanity's good intentions; likewise, during the Reaper War it was to Shepard that the leaders of the galaxy turned to mediate their disputes. She was a woman who understood the power of a dramatic gesture, and thus when given a mission—not to achieve a military objective, but to make a political statement—she made one in grand fashion.

     - Sara Janowski, _Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance_ , p. 153

Biographies of Shepard have tended to descend into political hagiography, as though Shepard had the wherewithal or inclination to consider all the possible repercussions of her decisions. In fact, it was her tunnel vision—her absolute focus on completing the mission, no matter what the cost, no matter what the consequences—that enabled her to make those decisions in an instant without second-guessing herself afterward. It was a trait enhanced by her continual exposure to situations where her actions might have resulted in death, but where inaction would most certainly have been fatal.

     - Matriarch Nelloria, "Shepard at 100: A Century of Scholarship in Review"

—

The usual accounts of Torfan give only Alliance and batarian casualties, eliding the deaths of captured slaves—human and otherwise. Estimates for the number of slaves wounded or killed during the battle vary widely, from just thirty (Andreesen) to five hundred (Peraltus); the most commonly accepted estimate places it at around 150 (Nerin). What is certain is that the batarians used their captured slaves as human shields. It was a strategy that had stood them in good stead in previous engagements with human forces, including the incident at Taitus in 2174, when the Alliance commander let a batarian slaver convoy go despite outnumbering it three to one rather than risk firing on ships with their holds crammed full of hostages.

Shepard made a different choice. As usual, in the conflict between two armed parties, it was the unarmed who were caught in the crossfire and paid the highest price.

     - Soreya T'Rau, _A Comparative History of Slavery Across the Galaxy_ , p. 973

"You weren't there. It's easy for you to second-guess when you're not staring into all four of a batarian's eyes smirking at you from behind a slave brainwashed so thoroughly that they just stand there.

"I mean, what were we going to do? Just back off and leave them there? Lay down our weapons and get captured ourselves? Let the batarians do that to more people? That wouldn't have done anyone any good. Believe me, they were better off dead than alive in that hellhole."

     - Corporal Sofia Bergstrom, 21 Nov 2178

"We were supposed to be there rescuing them, and instead we just shot them down like dogs. They never had a chance. If we hadn't been there, they might still be alive."

     - Private Evgeni Sokolov, 22 Nov 2178

—

Say this for Shepard: she never hesitated to lead from the front. She was on one of the last shuttles to leave Torfan, and it was not until she was back aboard the _SSV Boston_ that she finally collapsed. Adrenaline, determination, and her hardsuit had hidden the damage, but medical scans revealed cracked ribs and a slow internal bleed in addition to an astonishing array of cuts and contusions. Her long convalescence in a military hospital insulated her from much of the initial backlash.

     - Emerson Blake, _Ad Astra: A Life of Commander Shepard_ , p. 178

It is remembered differently these days, but the initial reaction to news of the battle was jubilant; humanity had taken the fight to the much-hated batarians and struck a decisive blow. It was only as new details trickled out in the following weeks that opinions began to turn. As the Alliance began to notify the families of the deceased and the injured were released and began to talk, it became impossible to hide the number of human casualties. A handful of batarians had managed to escape the slaughter; their stories were widely broadcast within Hegemony space, and were picked up here and there by Council commentators.

But it was the anonymous delivery of helmet-cam footage of the executions to the Westerlund News that brought news of the outrage at Torfan to broad public attention. The whistleblower has never been conclusively identified, but at least one external investigation pointed the finger at Lieutenant Liam Athearn, who received a dishonorable discharge eight months after the battle.

     - Theodora Rinaldi, "Paying the Butcher: Torfan Revisited"

There was something of a galactic outcry when news of Torfan became widespread, but it was much quieter than it might have been if any race other than the widely unpopular batarians had been involved. After all, the battle had taken place deep into the Skyllian Verge, a sector of space already generally considered a wild and lawless place, populated mostly by pirates, slavers, mercenaries, and foolishly optimistic colonists. Intervention by a government could only be an improvement, and at any rate, ugly death—no matter whether it came via gun or weather or thresher maw—was a fact of life in the Verge.

What little commentary that came out was primarily focused on xenophobic fears stoked by rapid human expansion and this demonstration of human military might rather than on the deaths of batarian prisoners; many in the galactic community—most notably turians, accustomed to the idea of total war, but also asari who remembered the violent batarian annexation of Esan—even approved of the latter.

     - Sorik Venn, "The Lesser Evil: Other Races Respond to Torfan"

There was a distinct split in internal response to Shepard's actions at Torfan. The elected officials of Parliament quickly went from basking in the success of their statement to furiously debating whether Shepard should be celebrated or reviled; meanwhile, the military high command closed ranks around Shepard.

The furor in the media makes it easy to forget that Shepard was never officially reprimanded for her actions at Torfan; in fact, they played a major role in her later selection as first human Spectre. In public, the Alliance military was close-mouthed. In private, they gave her a medal and the choicest assignments, and promoted her right on schedule.

     - Sara Janowski, _Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance_ , p. 158

While Torfan is conventionally cited as early evidence of Shepard's ruthlessness, it is also notable as a demonstration of her personal charisma. Upon finding herself suddenly thrust into command, she managed to rally the troops through the confusion of the battlefield to repulse the unexpectedly fierce batarian resistance. Over the course of three days in 2178, she repeatedly ordered the marines under her command deeper into the hellish underground warrens that formed the battlefield; not one of them demurred, and several stepped forward to defend her in the furor that followed. The epithet "Butcher of Torfan" came from the media, not from the surviving remnants of her unit.

     - Maria Escarra, "Torfan and its Aftermath" in _The Proceedings of the 54th Symposium on Early Alliance History_

Escarra uncritically accepts the assertion that the epithet "Butcher of Torfan" came from outside the military. In fact, while the first recorded use of that name occurred on the Westerlund News, it was spoken by Commander Mihaly Ruzsa, an aide to Admiral Hackett. In addition, at least two surviving members of Shepard's squad requested transfers in the month immediately following in the battle.

"Not one of them demurred," Escarra writes, as if that indicates anything other than military discipline. Though the Alliance has put it into practice only twice, desertion under fire is still nominally punishable by immediate execution. Given Shepard's history, is there any question whether she would have hesitated?

     - Vartan Arkanian, "The 54th Symposium on Early Alliance History in Review"

—

Torfan was where Shepard established the reputation for ruthlessness that would be borne out over and over again in the years and conflicts that followed. It was also cited as a primary reason for her appointment as first human Spectre, setting her on the long road that led to the Crucible.

Nevertheless, the epithet "Butcher of Torfan" was one that would follow her through the years to come. It is a testament to Shepard's personal qualities that she was able to win the loyalty and devotion of many who knew her first by that name.

     - Emerson Blake, _Ad Astra: A Life of Commander Shepard_ , p. 189

Shepard's N7 training prepared her to lead, to make life-or-death decisions without guidance while deep in enemy territory. Time and time again in the years after, she acted decisively in the face of all odds, from her perseverance in pursuing Saren Arterius to her insistence in the face of opposition and disbelief on all fronts that the Reapers were coming. It was at Torfan that Shepard learned the most important lesson of her career: not how to shoot a gun or give orders; not what ethical questions to ask in the midst of war; but that, if she acted with enough certainty, others would follow.

     - Sara Janowski, _Sword, Shield, and Hammer: Commander Shepard and the Systems Alliance_ , p. 161

Torfan taught Shepard one thing: that if she shot first, no one would stop her.

So at Torfan she shot surrendering batarians, and when the opportunity came to give new life to a race long thought dead she executed the last of the rachni; when gas grenades proved too troublesome she shot innocent colonists at Feros, and then the life form—unique in the known galaxy—that controlled them; and when the chance came at Aratoht to press a button that would slaughter a quarter of a million batarians all unawares, she took it. What the general focus on strategic messaging vis-a-vis human military might or on Shepard's personal motivation elides is this: the execution of surrendering prisoners has been prohibited since the mid-twentieth century. There can be no excuse for the atrocities committed at Torfan.

     - Theodora Rinaldi, "Paying the Butcher: Torfan Revisited"

The general tendency in recent years has been to focus on Torfan as it regards Shepard. What that focus elides is that the battle was a notable victory in its own right, conclusively demonstrating humanity's ability to protect its own even on the fringes of colonized space, a mere twenty-one years after entering the galactic stage in dramatic fashion. Just eight years earlier, Alliance marines had been pinned down helplessly while batarian slavers took their pick of the colonists on Mindoir and slaughtered the rest, unable to do anything but to pick up the pieces afterward. Now, they had conclusively demonstrated that they were to be reckoned among the great powers of the Citadel races. In short, Torfan presaged the leading role humanity would take in the war to come.

     - Naveen Patil, _A Strategic Perspective on the Reaper War_ , p. 35

Torfan cemented the human reputation for aggression that had been born during the Relay 314 Incident—a remarkable achievement, considering that they were operating in a galaxy in which the krogan exist. But it also made it clear that the First Contact War had been no fluke—that humanity was a force to be reckoned with.

In the last two years of peace that followed the Battle of the Citadel, the turians ramped up their construction of dreadnoughts, building two more in record time. Reapers or no Reapers, the evidence that an unknown threat might reemerge at any moment could not be ignored. The Alliance did likewise. Joint exercises between the two most militarily-inclined races in Council space became an increasingly common occurrence, while the salarian Special Tasks Group sent a handful of representatives to keep tabs on the shift in the galactic balance of power heralded by a potential human-turian alliance. In the calm before the storm, humans and turians each found surprisingly like-minded allies in the other.

     - Andrius Stavros, _Past Relay 314: A Brief History of Human-Turian Relations_ , p. 266

The batarian alienation from the Council races in general and humanity in particular had come to a head in 2168, when the Hegemony severed relations with the Council and effectively became a rogue state. After Torfan, they effectively withdrew from Council space entirely. This, coupled with their specific hatred of Shepard as an individual and exacerbated by the insularity of their empire as well as possible indoctrination of key government figures, meant that the batarians were almost certainly the least prepared of all the major races in the known galaxy for the Reaper invasion. 

Thus it was that when the Reapers arrived, the culture they had sought to preserve through withdrawal was instead irrevocably shattered. That minor mission on a small moon in an obscure corner of the Skyllian Verge turned out to have geopolitical implications that continued to reverberate long afterward. Ultimately, it made of the batarians a sacrificial lamb for the Reapers.

     - Adina T'Min _, Sunset on Khar'shan: The Last Days of the Batarian Hegemony_ , p. 325

There has been a trend in recent scholarship of glossing over—of excusing, even—what actually happened at Torfan in favor of discussing the later implications of those events—something that might not be the case if the batarians were in a better position to object, and not decimated and scattered across the galaxy, reduced to begging for scraps from races less scarred by the Reaper War.

The fact is that Shepard showed a reckless disregard for life verging on the sociopathic, and had a vindictive streak a mile wide. Torfan was only the beginning; the violence that sickened her commanding officer, Major Kyle, to the point of mental incapacity became her signature. In the years to come, she would write it across the stars.

     - Theodora Rinaldi, "Paying the Butcher: Torfan Revisited"

—

What Torfan meant to Shepard personally is still a mystery. Her after action report, recently declassified, is a marvel of clinical understatement. She left no journals, gave no interviews about Torfan; she never spoke of it afterward, at least to anyone inclined to recount the conversation.

It might be tempting to read something into that deep silence; but despite her fame and despite seas of ink spilled by armies of historians, Shepard remains a cipher. Even at the peak of her media visibility following the Battle of the Citadel she remained frustratingly opaque, enabled at least in part by the tight control Alliance public relations retained over the media outlets permitted to interview her; her answers were invariably circumspect to the point of blandness, and she was never pressed on them. The truth is that we will never know what drove her, or why.

     - Charlotte Winters, _Commander Shepard: The Definitive Biography_ , p. 489

Shepard always did what she thought was necessary, no matter what the cost. She might have been wrong, sometimes; certainly I questioned some of her decisions at the time, though I always believed that she was doing the best she could with what was given to her. But that was the price—that she paid, that we all paid—for her to be what she was and do what she did. There has never been anyone like her. There may never be again.

     - Liara T'Soni, _Remembering Commander Shepard_ , p. xxii

—

Batarian slavers attacked Mindoir in 2170, killing or capturing several thousand colonists. This tragic event spurred Shepard to join the Alliance military on her eighteenth birthday. Over the next eleven years she proved herself on many difficult missions. Her exemplary record led to her selection as the first human Spectre. The rest is history.

     - _An Introduction to Galactic History_ , 10th ed., Chapter 25: The Reaper War, p. 877

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://bloodbright.tumblr.com/)!


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